1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a terminal device, a data transmission method, and a computer-readable recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conference systems for conducting remote conferences with remote locations via the Internet, or the like, have become widely used. With the conference system, in a conference room where there is one of the participants to conduct a remote conference, the image and the voice of the participant are collected by using a terminal device, and the digital data is transmitted to a terminal device in a conference room where there is the other of the participants. Then, the terminal device in the conference room, in which there is the other of the participants, presents images on a display and outputs sounds by using a speaker, whereby a communication is established.
Furthermore, in recent years, with the above-described conference system, document data that is generated by a document preparation program, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a drawing generation program, a photo editing program, or the like, has been often shared by terminal devices.
Furthermore, document data usually contains a large amount of data. Therefore, in the conference system, sharing of document data causes the occurrence of a delay of video data and audio data, a loss of packets, or the like, which results in a lack of information. Hence, in this type of conference system, a bandwidth is previously assigned to each of video data, audio data, and document data in accordance with the available network bandwidth so that information is prevented from being lacked with regard to all of the video data, the audio data, and the document data. Furthermore, in the conference system, the video data, the audio data, and the document data are transmitted and received within the range that is assigned to each of them. Thus, in the conference system, regardless of the data amount of document data, it is possible to transmit and receive video data and audio data without fail.
However, in conventional conference systems, even if a narrow network bandwidth is available to a terminal device on the transmitting side, a bandwidth is assigned to each of the video data, the audio data, and the document data in order of priority that is previously defined. Thus, as a result of assignment of the bandwidth, the bandwidth is sometimes not sufficient to transmit document data. In such a case, however, the terminal device needs to perform an operation to transmit the document data in accordance with the assigned bandwidth. Therefore, in some cases, the terminal device compresses the document data at a too high compression rate or extremely decreases the resolution or the frame rate. In this case, there is a possibility that the terminal device extremely encodes document data such that, when the document data is decoded by the receiving side, the contents of information cannot be understood.
In view of the above-described conventional problem, there is a need to prevent extreme encoding such that, when document data is decoded by the receiving side, the contents of information cannot be understood.